Cluster for Migration, Citizenship, and Belonging

Migratory movements challenge the nation-state model, which has imposed itself as the hegemonic template of political belonging and functions as the central framework for production of majorities, minorities, belongingness and statelessness. Citizenship is permeated by racial hierarchies that commonly privilege certain subjects over others concerning mobility, power, and voice.

In this cluster, we analyse the ongoing and global processes of colonial exploitation, discrimination, and othering of racialised and minoritised people currently living among an imagined 'us' and sharing the political space, mainly on unequal terms. In this context, the concept of belonging becomes central. On the one hand, the privilege of belonging can be mobilised to exclude and oppress minorities. On the other hand, acts of resistance and agency among othered groups take on many (new) forms, oppose hegemonic discourses of privilege, and create strategies for new ways of belonging, which can act as an antidote to exclusion and build resilience.

Members of the cluster mobilise critical theories within the humanities and social sciences to analyse how majoritarian membership is constructed and how relations of dominance and subordination are produced and undone. Similarly, critical stances towards methodological nationalism are encouraged to problematise the role of research in sustaining global injustice structures. In addition, cluster members find it essential to highlight the experiences, collective sufferings, resistance, agency and voices of disenfranchised groups that might engender new inclusionary political visions about the world where people can live their lives and differences relationally and non-hierarchically.

Within the cluster, migration, citizenship, and belonging are approached using analytical tools from postcolonial research perspectives. Belongingness, statelessness, citizenship, migration, asylum-seeking, family reunification, strategies for resilience, and conditions for resettlement are analysed with interest in the various ways that race, ethnicity, class, languages, material culture, cultural heritage, and religion intersect and relate to each other in these contexts. The cluster welcomes researchers to join in urgent and critical conversations unveiling dichotomising and othering practices and discourses as well as inclusion, resistance and activism that affect the quality of life for those being constructed as established and outsiders within the context of the nation-states.

Photo: Artist Nizar Ali Badr, Syria